


What will I do in the sunrise

by Resri



Series: How Yondu got himself a shiny boyfriend [1]
Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Gen, It's the 1000 year war okay, Kree (Marvel), M/M, Minor Character Death, Pre-Slash, Pre-Yondu/Martinex, Yondu hurts, Yondu is a battle slave, a lot of people die, and doesn't understand why
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-01
Updated: 2018-02-01
Packaged: 2019-03-12 11:21:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13546299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Resri/pseuds/Resri
Summary: The world is silent apart from an erratic heart beat droning in his ears like war drums. Deep, dull quakes tremor in his chest and head, taking away pain, exhaustion, his every thought until the blood pumping through his veins like molten steal is all that's left.The heart of war is beating in his chest.





	What will I do in the sunrise

**Author's Note:**

> Heya! 
> 
> So this is the prequel of "Glitter and Gold", and the beginning of the story of how Yondu got himself a shiny boyfriend, and a whole lot of other things, too. I hope you enjoy :D
> 
> The title and the inspiration came from the song "Get Free" by Major Lazer. I think it fits Yondu pretty well, and love it because it's A) an awesome song, and B) I connect a weirdly specific and totally random memory with it. The brain is strange.

The world is silent apart from an erratic heart beat droning in his ears like war drums. Deep, dull quakes tremor in his chest and head, taking away pain, exhaustion, his every thought until the blood pumping through his veins like molten steal is all that's left. 

The heart of war is beating in his chest. 

Y77 9K4 90Q opens his eyes, and drags in a deep breath. The air is accompanied by fine dust that scratches all the way down, and he hacks it back up before finally sweet sweet oxygen can sooth his screaming lungs.  
The sounds of battle crash back in on him. Weapons' fires, screams, flesh tearing or burning, m-ships falling from the sky. The dust of the plains was whirled into the air by thousands of feet marching, and the ground turned into a slick mire through the blood falling like a spring rain. Y77 9K4 90Q is caked in it, a mixture of dirt and still warm blood and sweat and fear. The battle is on his body, the stink in his nose, the noise in his ears, and the horrors before his eyes. But inside, in his chest, is a strong rhythm hammering away. The yaka sings through the bond, crippled as it might be because of the shot that had grazed the grotesque prosthesis the masters have given him. He lets the drums take him, lets himself forget the ache in exhausted, abused muscles, lets himself forget the worry that the dirt is in the open hole in his head, and that the disinfect showers the slaves get herded through at the end of the day may be too late. He's lived this long. He lived, and fought, and killed, and lived and lived and lived. He won't die today. So he kicks off the dead Hurctarian that had given his life to stop Y77 9K4 90Q from reaping his comrades like death incarnate, and gets to his feet. 

The arrow isn't anywhere in sight, but with the amount of muck and bodies it's really no surprise. The light thrum of life in his implant tells him it's close, but when he whistles nothing happens.  
Which is unfortunate, because there is still a battle going on around him. A Xandarian has noticed him getting up, shaky and disoriented, and decides to make the easy kill. Y77 9K4 90Q doesn't have the advantage of being small anymore. He's fully grown and the mud hides his youthful face. Gone are the days when a Nova would hesitate to pull the trigger because they thought they saw a child. He's never been a child, only ever a slave. A young slave, admittedly, but a slave nonetheless. He knows how to survive, so he doesn't hesitate. 

Before the Xandarian can even whip his gun around (and it's one of those atrocious plasma cannons that burn through the masters' armors, and rip maws into the unprotected flesh of the battle slaves) Y77 9K4 90Q throws himself at him. The arrow isn't his only weapon, and he's been a front liner in this war a long time before a chunk of metal and crystal was wedged into his skull. The Nova fights valiantly, but he's lost the advantage the second Y77 9K4 90Q was in close range, rendering the gun useless. It's not long before another body hits the ground.  
Armed with a dead man's gun, Y77 9K4 90Q goes searching for his arrow. If they win this battle, and he is still in a condition to walk to his designated ship, the masters will fix his head. Not out of kindness, of course, but because he kills better with it (Not fight better, because he fights good with everything one could possibly use as a weapon. But the arrow is a lot more time efficient). It can't be far, and he listens to the whispers of a rotted sense that tell him where to go. On the way he shoots until the plasma cartridge is empty, lets the gun drop and picks up a blaster instead. It's handle is slippery from the mud, but the battery is full. By the time Y77 9K4 90Q has found the arrow, the blaster's empty, too, and he puts the last volley into the head of an Aakon wrangling with a Luphomoid slave. He looks surprised to see him, but considering he's holding the arrow in his fist and apparently used it as impromptu weapon since Y77 9K4 90Q got knocked out, he must have thought him dead. 

“It's good to see you, 77,” Y13 1H8 97Q murmurs. It's stupid, because he says it like he cares. And Y77 9K4 90Q offers him a hand up, which is just as dumb. 

“That's mine,” he says, even though it really isn't. He doesn't own things, he is an owned thing. But he's the wielder of the arrow, and nobody else can. The masters gave it to him, sawed into his skull and rammed a crystal in to give him the ability to use it, so he's gonna be the one carrying it, too. At least until he's back at the ship, where the overseer will press a button and make him drop unconscious, take it away and put it back in a box, because even the masters are scared of what that arrow can do with a whistle from his lips. 

Y13 hands it over without a moments hesitation. 

“Most of the others died when you fell,” he says with his quiet, inflectionless voice that still sounds like he feels something. Of course they are dead. Many stayed close to Y77 9K4 90Q, because even before the arrow he could lead, and they survived longer. Until they didn't, of course. Y13 is one of them, has been in the same battalion for a long time. Maybe the longest of all the slaves he's ever known. Maybe it's good that he isn't dead. Just because Y77 9K4 90Q knows what the Luphomoid is capable of, and how to fight at his side. So he hands him his knife in exchange for the arrow, and then marches on. 

They meet more of the slaves from their pen, and they follow him again because obviously not even a bullet to the head can kill him, but Y77 9K4 90Q lets the smell of blood and the pulse in his ears drown them out. Muscle memory, instinct and habits that were beaten, burned and cut into him take over, and he goes to war. 

~

The masters commanded them to take a gun emplacement, where an antiaircraft cannon was blowing necrocrafts out of the sky. It was located on a hill, and heavily guarded since it was the last stand of the Nova in this part of the plains.  
They take it, like everything the Kree set out to make their own. With countless deaths, enemies as well as battle slaves crushed under the boots of the marching, never ending armies. Slaves are, after all, a unlimited resource. If 80% of your units die in battle, just conquer some new, uncontacted world, or start the breeding experiments up again, and the Nova will be scrambling again in no time at all. 

Now the night is settling in, and the Nova retreat in the same direction as the sun. Y77 9K4 90Q sits beneath the smoldering remains of the cannon. His body's hurts have caught up with him, now that the immediate fight is over and the beat of the war drums has left his chest, leaving behind a bone deep tiredness. His head throbs in time with his pulse, and the dried mud burns in dozens of cuts. He hopes the damage in his implant isn't too serious, or the slave keeper will punish him for getting the precious technology broken. He doesn't think he could move, even if his legs weren't weighed down by Y13. The Luphomoid's breaths are short and wet, and he isn't all that heavy for a grown man, so Y77 9K4 90Q lets him rest there. He'll kick him off once he's dead and can't feel the cold ground anymore. 

“It's pretty,” Y13 says into the silence. 

After a moment of looking around in confusion, Y77 9K4 90Q asks, “What is?” against his better judgment. In the end, it doesn't really matter. No master is close to hear the idle chit chat, and Y13 doesn't have enough strength to formulate whole sentences in the sign lingo the slaves use in secret. 

“The sunset.” 

Y77 9K4 90Q considers it, the sun crawling into the horizon, painting the sky a vibrant red and orange because of the dust particles in the air. He doesn't see the prettiness, really, only the approaching cold of the night, the beginning of a rest period, and the end of a fight for survival that he's won, and Y13 not. So he grunts noncommittally, and keeps quiet. 

“You like pretty things, don't you?” the Luphomoid suddenly asks, making Y77 9K4 90Q look back at him sharply. “I know you do, I've seen the pebble you hide in the wall panel, the one with the glittering vein in it. And the shard of pink glass.” 

Both were found on battle fields, a few months apart. They reflected the light, and he still has no idea why he picked them up and went through the trouble of hiding them in his mouth to get them on the ship, because it's stupid and dangerous.  
He doesn't know what to say to Y13's words. Dread fills his guts, because if Y13 saw him at that wall panel, then others could, too. The overseer could find out, and then he'd whip him again, splitting the skin on his back wide open, tearing the flesh away with every snap. The last time he'd angered the overseer, he barely survived the fever of infection, and only because Y13 had shared his water and rations with him like an idiot. 

“Don't worry, 77. Nobody knows, and I'll take your secret to the grave,” Y13 says with a breathy laugh that comes out more like a gurgle. His smile is soft, when he looks up, before returning his gaze to the horizon. 

“It's fitting, isn't it? That the last thing I see is a pretty sunset,” he continues. “I remember my mother telling me stories about how the setting sun would take the souls of the dead with it to the other side. To the eternal light. The living stay behind in the night, and have to stay strong to battle the demons, because they live only in the dark and prey on the vulnerable. If one survives until the sun rises again, they are save for another day.” 

“We fight plenty in the daylight, too,” Y77 9K4 90Q says, because that story doesn't make sense. Nobody's save in the light. On the contrary, the shadows are usually hiding them from the masters' wrath or the enemies' cross hairs. Y13 only coughs, and it might have been a laugh if his lungs weren't filling with blood. 

“That's true. I just want to see the sunrise again,” he mumbles after he's stopped hacking up blueish blood, and there is so much pain in his voice. More than any kind of physical wound ever caused in all the time they've known each other. The last time Y77 9K4 90Q has felt pain like that was when the masters had cut off his crest. Deeper than bone, and so much worse than nerves can feel. 

“Just one more time, you know? I haven't seen the sunrise since I was a kid. The Kree took it away, and now I can barely remember how it feels. And you? Have you ever actually seen it? Felt it? Do you even understand what I'm talking about?” 

His voice is a breathy whisper, wheezing out of his mouth. Y77 9K4 90Q knows it's over soon, and wonders what to say. Does he understand? Not really, no, because they have both seen plenty of sunrises on the battle field, but Y13 seems to be talking of something different. 

“I'm sure it'll be sunny where you go,” he says instead, even though it's a lie. Slave's aren't people, and they don't go anywhere when they die. There is nothing inside that could go on living after the body crumbles, so they just cease to exist. But the masters aren't here to punish him for such talk, so a little lie to a dying man doesn't cost him anything.  
Y13 smiles faintly, and breathes, “I hope you'll get to see it some day,” before falling silent. His eyes are locked on the sunset until they go blind, and Y77 9K4 90Q keeps him on his lap until he goes cold. 

All around him, spaced out over the entire battle field, the slaves that are still breathing settle down for the night. The transport ships are too far behind them to return to, but they don't have to be worried of being left behind. This battle has only started a few days ago, and they won't leave before this moon is won. By the time the Nova run (and they will run, because the war drums have told him so, because losing isn't an option, because he will not die in the muck and mire of this nameless rock), the slave ships will have followed their marching cargo to collect whatever is left. So Y77 9K4 90Q hunkers down and sleeps among the dead. 

~

When his eyes snap open it's still dark. He stays still on the ground, in the cold mud, and listens for whatever woke him. His heart is gearing up to a loud drum roll already, and his muscles tense in preparation for a fight, all his senses going out. Next to him lies Y13, dead and cold and stinking. When there's no movement around him for several minutes, he gets up, armed with the arrow in one fist and the knife Y13 doesn't need anymore in the other. He sneaks around the remnants of the cannon, wearily mustering the bodies on the ground to see if one of them is only faking. The dried muck stuck to his body cracks with every movement, crumbling away at the bending spots of his limbs and where his skin moves most. 

After doing three rounds, he decides that the distant rumble of the ships was all he heard. They're nothing to worry about, unless they come closer. 

He returns to his sleeping spot and cowers back down, tries to go back to sleep for another hour or two. His eyes return to Y13, though, and he suddenly feels restless with his dead companion's words crawling through his brain like maggots. They don't leave him alone, no matter how much he tells himself that the rumblings of a dying slave who remembered his equally dead momma shouldn't get under his skin. But they did, and he suddenly can't sit next to Y13 anymore. 

His muscles are stiff and hurting from days of hard manual labor and a night spent on the unforgiving ground, but at least he's in a condition again that lets him move, so he climbs the pedestal the cannon was mounted on and sits at the edge. His feet dangle a good three meters above the ground, and he lets his heels bounce off of the metal. The collar does it's job while he's out on the battle field, releasing nutrients into his blood stream to keep him in working condition. His stomach feels empty nonetheless. 

The horizon isn't completely dark anymore, he realizes. A gray line slashes the thick blackness in two, a border between dead, cold earth and endless sky. It's washed out and blurry, a testament to the amount of dust that's still in the air. With nothing else to do, apart from resting as long as he can before the day starts and the fight begins anew, he sits there and watches the vanguard of the day steadily climb higher, lighting up the sky long before the sun shows itself, softly painting the darkness away. First to gray, then to a soft orange. The night sky turns from the vastness of space to dark hues of blue, stretching further and further up in a gradient. The stars go pale until they're gone. 

It's a daily phenomenon on every planet he's fought on, but he has never watched quite so intently. Y13's words are stuck in his head, and he tries to see, to understand what the Luphomoid wasted his dying breath on saying. It would feel wrong, somehow, not to try. 

The world before him is still. Down in the plains beneath the hill where the war raged just a few hours ago and filled his every sense with blood lust and terror, the fog gently wafts over the ground. The growing expanse of white and orange sky pours just enough light over the field to reveal the shapes of the dead. They look ghostly, sticking up from the tufts of mist, colorless silhouettes in a sea of otherworldly haze.  
It's such a contrast to yesterday, when they fell in an act of violence so incomprehensible that Y77 9K4 90Q can't fathom it although he's been part of it for half his life. Now they lie still and peaceful in the soft silence of a slumbering world. 

And then, finally, after what feels like an endless amount of time waiting, the sun breaks the dark line of her nightly prison, and the twilight of dawn is showered in a light so suddenly, blindingly bright, it washes over the world like a breathtaking wave. 

_Have you ever actually felt it?_ Y13 had asked. And right now, looking down on the plain where the early morning fog reflects the sun beams so strongly that the thousands and thousands of corpses that litter the ground are invisible for just a moment, he thinks _no_ , he hasn't. Because in his chest is a pain not unlike what he felt when the masters cut off his crest. Deeper than bone, like in Y13's voice. Yes, the sunrise is beautiful, but in a way that might break him, because suddenly he feels something that doesn't make sense, that he has no business feeling as a born slave, a tool for his masters to use, with no soul of his own.  
He feels loss. 

Loss of something that never was his to begin with. Something that he has no way of ever receiving. 

Y77 9K4 90Q wishes, more fervently than he's ever wished for anything, that he was more than just a body. That there was something in his chest apart from a heart that could beat like a war drum. Wishes that this feeling that is so new and so old would go away, because he doesn't understand what it means. Wishes that the only one who could have explained the pain to him wasn't decaying in the mud. 

But wishes don't come true for slaves, and so he sits, shivering in the white light of another day, and hurts. 

~

The Nova lose their last stand on the moon in the early evening, and retreat. The masters have won another gateway into Nova space, and another entry point to send their troops through.  
The slaves, the ones that can still move, stumble to the transport ships. 

Y77 9K4 90Q is among them. 

His insides are still raw, and his head throbs worse now than ever, but his shivers are due to overexertion, not to the broken thing in his chest. When he comes close to the ship he belongs on, a guard spots him, and stomps over. Y77 9K4 90Q expects a painful jolt of electricity to knock him out, like it usually does to make sure that he's unconscious before any master comes close to retrieve the arrow, but the implant is cracked, and the collar stays dormant. Apparently, the guard knows. 

“The overseer thought you bit the dust when we lost the signal of your implant,” she says with a grin, and takes a hold of the arrow and then Y77 9K4 90Q's collar to steer him aboard. The slaves go through a doorway with sensors that register the collars and therefore the number and identity of the cargo. Then they get ushered into the decontamination showers, where they take off their dirty, torn clothes and get hosed down with disinfectant. 

When Y77 9K4 90Q stumbles back out on the other side that leads to the cargo hold, dripping wet and naked, the guard is there again, grabs him by the collar and calls, “I told you we'd see that one again,” while twirling the arrow in her free hand. “Pay up!” 

The slave keeper looks up from his data pad, and when his eyes fall on Y77 9K4 90Q he bares his teeth in an ugly grimace. He fishes a unit chit out of a pocket to chug it at the guard, and punches Y77 9K4 90Q in the face. His head snaps to the side, and the steady throb in his skull gets ten times worse, but he doesn't go down since the guard is still holding onto his collar. When the overseer's knee connects with his gut, though, he's let go and drops to the floor wheezing.  
The slave keeper always gets nasty when he loses a bet. 

“Get him up and repair his implant!” he hisses at the guard, wrenching the arrow out of her hand to put it into the yaka box, and goes away. 

~

In space, the sun doesn't rise. Not that Y77 9K4 90Q would know from personal experience, since the slave pens aren't anywhere near a porthole. But he's heard the masters say it, some kind of butchered proverb that they use in situations that he doesn't understand. 

So, in space the sun doesn't rise, and until that day it never even occurred to him, because he had other priorities, like fighting other slaves for food, or fighting the masters' enemies on the battlefield, or staying alive. It's what he does, after all. Fighting and staying alive. It's what he's always done. 

But now, the memory of that sunrise doesn't leave his head (still a little sore from the repair work that felt like someone was poking the end of a screwdriver at open, raw nerve endings). That perfect ache of the first light beam falling on him and cutting into him like no knife ever could. The feeling of loss hasn't left yet, and the longing for something that he has no name for. But he knows that he'd very much like to see another sunrise, on some planet that doesn't stink of death, with a calm pulse instead of the heart of war hammering in his chest.  
_What would I do in the sunrise? _he wonders, not looking in the direction of the slave keeper beating some new Easik he'd caught looking him in the eye. The new one's, the one's who are adults when a sigil gets stamped into their backs for the first time, always have trouble understanding that they aren't people anymore. They either learn fast, or die. Either way Y77 9K4 90Q doesn't care. He cared for Y13, and look what that got him. He's being eaten alive by a thing he doesn't have a name for.__

__Suddenly, the overseer's wrist comm lights up, and he leaves the slave lying on the floor to snarl at it. Y77 9K4 90Q doesn't understand much through the tinny sound of the comm's speakers, but what he hears sounds suspiciously like, “Incoming ship...”  
Only a moment later, the floor rocks under their feet, and alarms blare, and the overseer fiddles with his wrist piece some more, eyeing the doors. Y77 9K4 90Q doesn't know who just attacked, but he hopes they are impressive enough for the masters to open the cages. Because the overseer is really close to his cage, and has his back turned to him, and there's the yaka box peaking out of the inside pocket of his coat. Maybe, if he's fast and the overseer can't push the knock out button, he'll get a chance to chase the loss away, and maybe find out what a sunrise looks like, away from the masters._ _

__Then the doors burst open, and people enter that are neither Kree nor Nova. They carry weapons, and they swarm into the room with military precision, but they look surprised by what they find. Y77 9K4 90Q catches a glimpse of the dawn among the intruders. What else could it be, the bright, colorful lights that glitter under the strobes on the ceiling for a tiny moment, if not the rise of a sun?_ _

__The overseer opens the cages._ _

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading <3 
> 
> A comment would make my day


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